In the commentaries to be heard or read these days (late January 2010), our propagandists and journalists have a tendency to say that 1,100,000 persons, 1 million of them Jews, died at Auschwitz. The figure shown since 1995 on the 21 commemorative slabs there is 1,500,000. The previous ones, of which there were 19 in 1990, gave the figure of 4 million, as decreed out of hand at the Nuremberg trial. Up to now the lowest exterminationist estimate has been that of Fritjof Meyer in May 2002: 510,000 (“Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz. Neue Erkenntnisse durch neue Archivfunde”, Ost Europa, May 2002, p. 631-641).

The true number for the time span from May 1940 to January 1945 might be 125,000 dead both for Auschwitz and the thirty or so minor camps connected to it. The typhus epidemics worked their ravages, especially in 1942, even in the ranks of the Germans, and even amongst the head physicians.

The numbers of corpses kept awaiting cremation, then actually cremated, were recorded by the Germans in their “mortuary registries” (Leichenhallenbücher) but, until now, despite my insistence on this point, I have never been able to get our revisionists (or supposed revisionists) who go on site to demand to see those registries in the Auschwitz Archives. I do not understand this attitude. Engaging in theoretical speculations on cremation or crematoria to reckon the possible or probable number of cremations in a camp like that of Auschwitz is hardly of interest, particularly when there exist, within arm’s reach as it were, registries showing the precise number of bodies awaiting cremation at a given moment. Personally, I can no longer go to Auschwitz but, if I could, I would proceed as I did in 1975 and, especially, 1976, in the middle of the Communist period, when I succeeded in obtaining from the man in charge of the camp Archives, Tadeusz Iwaszko, copies of Polish documents in which I discovered the architectural drawings for the crematoria; those drawings had been kept hidden since the war: they enabled me to prove that the alleged (homicidal) “gas chambers” were but innocuous “Leichenhalle” or “Leichenkeller”, that is, simple mortuaries, either on ground level or partly below ground. I was then unaware of the existence of the Leichenhallenbücher, mentioned, for example, in 1989 (Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1989, p. 10, 127). More than ever, let’s demand that these precious records be published!